The battle of inches on gun safety

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., continues to bore into the Washington bureaucracy on the important issue of gun safety, and on the availability of so-called bump stocks in particular. The innocuously named bump stock is an attachment that costs in the $200 to $300 range and will turn, essentially, a semi-automatic rifle into a machine gun by harnessing the power of the rifle’s recoil to chamber a round and fire more rapidly.

The bump stock emerged from the esoteric jargon of gun enthusiasts into the headlines last year when a shooter used them on weapons that sprayed machine gun-like fire on people at a country music concert in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and wounding more than 500.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, exerting his leadership in the field, in January proposed legislation that would ban the sale of bump stocks in Connecticut.

On the national level, where some Democratic lawmakers, including Connecticut’s, also favor a ban, the slog toward any sort of gun safety steps is a steep, uphill one.

And even among parties that lean toward eliminating the bump stock, there is disagreement on whether to pursue the goal through passing a law — an act of Congress — or by administrative action, which can turn into a prolonged entanglement of legal challenges.

Connecticut Democratic lawmakers who favor a legislative ban won a small victory last week when Thomas Brandon, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, conceded under questioning from Blumenthal that a law — as opposed to a rule set up by administrative action — would be “the best route” to address the issue.

The bureau and its parent, the U.S. Department of Justice, have proposed such a rule that would ban the bump stock. That proposal is under review by the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The discouraging aspect to all of this is that there should be no dithering and parsing of phrases when it comes to something as potentially dangerous as the bump stock, which lets a weapon like at AR-15 fire with machine gun-like rapidity.

“Bump stocks are cheap, they are deadly and they have no place in our society,” Malloy said when announcing his legislative proposal.

Amen to that.

Blumenthal and others have to keep pushing for common sense restrictions on weapon and accessory availability.

And the debate over bump stocks can’t cloud the larger issues of universal background checks, an infinitely logical step for any civilized society, and the very availability of the semi-automatic rifles that clearly are the weapons of choice for mass murderers.

These are not Second Amendment issues. The right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution, and so be it. The Second Amendment is there to protect the people who choose to exercise that right.

The Second Amendment has to coexist with the expectation of every American that common sense safety steps are in place.